


origin stories

by sundancekid



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe
Genre: Gen, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-11
Updated: 2012-11-11
Packaged: 2017-11-18 11:52:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/560776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sundancekid/pseuds/sundancekid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>None of them chose their names. Captain America was chosen by politicians for its appeal. Iron Ma’am started as a joke -- a joke on Toni. Hawkeye was chosen because it looked good on posters, sounded good being shouted by a barker, trying to lure marks to the tent. Thora was chosen by her father. The Hulk was never meant to be a compliment. The Widowmaker was a compliment, but a loaded one. None of them picked their own names, and most hadn’t picked their own costumes, either, but here they were anyway.</em> The Avengers' beginnings, genderswapped.</p>
            </blockquote>





	origin stories

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [lokitty11](http://lokitty11.livejournal.com) for the beta.

Stevie Rogers was tiny, but not in the way women were supposed to be. She wasn't small in a feminine way; she was small in a way that made people think she was ten years old even after she turned 22. Short and skinny and no curves at all, with a cough that never really went away.

She'd wanted to be a WAC, had tried to sign up right away. She'd never been great at much traditionally feminine work, and she wasn't sure she'd be any better at men's work, but it seemed more exciting than running scrap drives and collecting bottlecaps and darning socks for soldiers.

Bucky was accepted right away -- and why wouldn't she be? Nearly six feet tall but every ounce a woman, strong and smart and funny and already a crack shot. Beautiful, truly beautiful, but fierce, too. Girls weren't supposed to get into fights, but both of them did, plenty. Bucky, though, Bucky won her fights. Boys never seemed to mind, though, her winking at them after she flattened ‘em. Boys didn't want to hit Stevie -- didn't want to hit a girl, didn't want to hit a little girl, fragile and wheezing. Boys didn't want to hit Bucky, either, because she was too pretty, but eventually they'd get over it, with both Stevie and Bucky. 

Usually Bucky had to step in for Stevie -- Stevie never _started_ fights, but she had a mouth on her, and she stood up for what was right, and not everyone liked that, especially not when they were in the wrong. And so Bucky would come in, and pull some punk off Stevie, and give him the what for, and Stevie would insist she could have handled it: "I had him on the ropes," she'd say, and Bucky would sling her arm around Stevie and say "I know you did," always being careful with her but never seeming to.

Bucky came home showing off the WAC manual they'd given her: _Your Job: To Replace Men. Be Ready To Take Over._

"Jamesina Buchanan Barnes, reporting for duty!" she'd crowed. "God, I hope I get sent over. I don't want to serve stateside, not unless Hitler shows up in the Bronx." She punched the air, bouncing on the balls of her feet, ready to take on the whole German army.

Stevie was rejected from service the first time, and the second, and on and on. Bucky begged her to stop, to stay here, to do the work on the homefront. But Stevie wouldn't do less than she could, and she could serve, she knew it.

It was her fifth try at registering that caught the attention of Dr. Erskine. He'd looked her up and down -- clinically, detached, not like men looked at Bucky, or like some men looked at Stevie -- and then asked, "Why do you want to serve?"

"I don't like bullies," Stevie had said, simply.

And that was that. She was shipped off to a base in Iowa within the week, and basic training began, an excruciating regimen of running and push ups and obstacle courses that Stevie found nearly impossible. All of it was under the eye of a parade of doctors and politicians and colonels, who watched with interest, or with boredom, or with barely disguised contempt. 

There was a lot of camaraderie among the WACs, a sense of shared adventure. It was hard to remember, here on base, that war was real, and not a game, because for most of the girls, this was the most exciting thing they'd ever done. So many girls had never had a chance to prove how smart they were, or been encouraged to be strong and fast and physical, until now. Everyone pushed everyone else to be her best, to keep up during runs, to do another set of jumping jacks, to finish the course. They were supposed to be competing for a chance to be part of Dr. Erskine's experiment, but the details were so vague that no one really felt like the competition mattered, not more than getting into shape and being good soldiers in general.

It became apparent that Dr. Erskine was thought of as a joke by the rest of the army. The SSR as a division had power, and money, but Erskine's pet project wasn't a priority. That's why they had him experiment on women. That's why they let him pick Stevie for his first test subject. Because they didn't believe he could really make a super soldier.

They changed their minds quick enough once Stevie staggered out of the Vita Ray machine, but by then it was too late. HYDRA had believed in what he could do, and had sent someone to stop him. And so the first man who'd ever believed in her, who'd looked past what she looked like to who she was, was gone.

So they just had Stevie Rogers, WAC, just a girl from Brooklyn, when they'd wanted a whole army of men to escort Adolf Hitler to the gates of hell. They had no idea what to do with her.

She loved her new body. She loved how powerful she felt. She was six-two now -- tall even for a man, giant for a woman -- and she was _strong_. She had curves, now, some, but mostly she was thin and taut. Lithe. Stevie didn't figure she looked much more womanly than she had before, but that didn't bother her. She'd never really counted on her looks appealing to anyone, anyway. And the fact that she could win a fight now -- could hit a man and he would stay down -- well, that was worth everything.

They made her a captain (someone hard at work on propaganda had decided "Captain America" was a catchy name, clearly) and put her to work selling war bonds. She felt silly doing it, but she wanted to serve her country, and it beat being a lab rat, which was the only other choice the SSR offered her. They gave her a costume that was just plain silly -- flared too-short skirt, halter top, heels for dancing. She wanted to refuse, but didn't know how. They gave her a song-and-dance routine about war bonds to do, and put her on a tour bus. She saw more of America than she'd ever imagined she would, growing up poor in Brooklyn. She liked the girls she toured with, but they didn't have much in common. Stevie made a lot of people, men and women, uncomfortable -- she always had, but people used to pity her, and now some of them feared her. She didn't care for either one. People took her more seriously now, because she was tall and strong. She didn't love that, that she was still the same Stevie Rogers but because she looked different, people treated her differently, but she couldn't change it, so she tried to use it. 

When they found out she could draw, they put her to drawing cartoons for printing in newspapers, pictures of women bravely waving their fellas off to war or children going door-to-door for scrap drives (they said the drawings helped "soften" her; people thinking she was soft had gotten Stevie exactly nowhere her whole life, it was only when they figured out she was hard as nails anything ever got done). She occasionally filmed PSAs -- about victory gardens, and recycling, and a few where she pretended to be in Europe, visiting the men on the front for a taste of home. 

By the time they sent Stevie to Europe for real, to entertain the troops, she'd resigned herself to to being a dancing monkey, to the costume, to the singing and dancing, to the photos she had to pose for. The men at the base hooted and hollered, and Stevie felt stupider than she ever had. She'd gotten into this to fight a war.

That's where she found out Bucky was captured, along with her whole squad, and no one was planning to go look for them, and WACs weren't even covered by the provisions protecting prisoners of war.

Well. If nobody else was going to get Bucky, Stevie was just going to have to do it herself.

She bribed an engineer into flying her into the drop zone -- he was happy to help, he'd told her with a smirk, he liked a woman with some fight in her, and asked her if she'd wanted to get fondue when she came back. Stevie had no idea what fondue was, and she suspected that question deserved a slap, but she needed his help, so she simply told him no thank you. She took the dinky shield that was part of her uniform, but traded her high heels for stolen boots.

The men being kept at the HYDRA base looked at her like she was crazy. "What the hell is a broad doing here?" one asked, interrupting her as she was giving them directions on the best way out.

"Saving your hides," she responded, trying to look as mature and responsible as she could while wearing an outfit meant to coordinate with an Andrews Sisters-style song about war bonds. 

"Look, sit here if you want. I don't care." (This was a lie, of course she cared, but she had to get them to respect her.) "But if you want to leave, the door is thatta way. I'll meet you guys in the clearing with anybody else I find."

"Wait," one man asked. "You know what you're doing?" He didn't sound so much concerned for her as derisive.

"Yeah," she responded, trying to sound more confident than she felt. "I've knocked out Adolf Hitler over 200 times." She turned on her heel and left them standing there, determined to find Bucky.

When she found Bucky, weak and drugged and tied to an operating table, Stevie's heart was in her throat. As she untied Bucky, silently praying for her to be okay, Bucky blearily opened her eyes. 

"It's me, it's Stevie."

"Stevie?"

"Come on," Stevie said, knowing they didn't have much time. "I thought you were dead."

"I thought you were smaller."

As she hauled Bucky out of the complex, Stevie ran into Schmidt. Erskine had told her about him, but it didn't prepare Stevie for the reality of the man -- if you could call a man who ripped his own face off "reality." It scared her, no use pretending it didn't. It scared her that he believed so deeply in what he said, that he was better, and she could see that he would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.

She and Bucky climbed to the next level, and Bucky inched along the girder toward their escape. She leapt the last few feet, as the girder buckled and gave way, leaving Stevie on the other side with no way to get across.

"Just go, get out of here!" Stevie yelled.

"No, not without you!" Bucky said, and she looked half crazed, sick and pale and terrified.

So Stevie jumped. It scared her to try, but she didn't have much choice. And in her experience, the things that scared you most were the things most worth doing.

Later, the SSR was very angry at her, even after she showed up with hundreds of freed prisoners and a great deal of HYDRA weaponry for them to study and use, but it really didn't matter. She had Bucky back, she had seen maps inside the base, and she was ready to take on HYDRA whether, frankly, the United States Army wanted her to or not.

But first, there was the matter of her uniform.

"Pants, gentlemen," she said. "I want pants."

"You can't wear pants," the senator said. "You gotta look like a dame. Dames sell war bonds."

"I'm not going out there looking like nose art. I'm a captain with the United States Army, and I'm going to be raiding HYDRA bases, not peddling war bonds. I need pants, I need boots. I'm not there to soft shoe with the Germans."

Stevie still looked, as Bucky so helpfully put it, "like a trampy American flag," but it was practical, it was warm, it was hers.

And the trampy American flag look had grown on her. Stevie wasn't interested in going undercover -- she wanted HYDRA to know it was her, when she came for them.

She took Bucky with her, of course. Colonel Phillips told her he'd chosen a team of men for her, but she told him, smiling as sweetly as she could, she'd already done it herself. Her team wasn't made up of soldiers who were noted for their ability to follow orders, but they were smart, determined, and mean as hell. And they weren't all men.

"How about you?" Stevie asked Bucky. "You ready to follow 'Captain America' into the jaws of death?"

"Hell no," she said. "Fellow girl from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight, I'm following her."

And it was _fun_ , oh it was fun. War shouldn't be fun, Stevie knew, and there were miserable parts too, long nights camped out in the woods worrying about frostbite (she'd always hated the cold, back before, and she still felt cold sometimes, even though her body didn't get cold anymore, the sense memory too strong), the injuries to her troops, who couldn't heal like she could. Terrified civilians. The smell of blood.

But Stevie had been given this body as a gift, and now she was repaying Dr. Erskine by using it. She didn't feel any different on the inside, but her body changed her ability to impose her will on the world, and she was going to use that. She had always pushed her body hard -- too hard, before, but now there was no too hard, nothing her body couldn't do. She needed to be strong and fast, she'd always needed to be strong and fast, and now her body didn't fail her.

And if she punched you, well, it was a whole new ball game.

So she couldn't pretend that blowing up bad guys and riding away on her motorcycle wasn't the best thing in the world, and she didn't try. Captain America should be sober and thoughtful, should take her commitment to her country seriously. And she did, she really did. But damn, a girl had to live a little.

That was something else she'd wanted in her team -- soldiers who really did like the rush, who were there with her, thinking it was fun. Her Howling Commandos understood her, as much as anyone did.

Later, after Bucky -- well, after Bucky, after the battle with Schmidt, when she knew the plane had to go down and she had to go with it, Stevie's last thought was how very much she hated the cold.

**Author's Note:**

> Bucky's manual is [real](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Army_Corps). I did most of my reading about WACs there and [this Army page](http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/WAC/WAC.HTM).
> 
> Feedback and con crit are welcome.


End file.
